Abstract

The rise of social media and the information age has brought in new challenges for people. In this post-truth era where information is easily shared among people, it has become increasingly more difficult for people to know whether a source they are reading is legitimate or not. It is often assumed that students today are naturally versed in technology and so they should be ones that can overcome this problem. However, there is ample evidence that students struggle with identifying online information as being credible and reliable, or as misinformation or disinformation. This was certainly a problem within my own classroom as my students were often using the first couple of hits in the search engine for many research projects. This inspired me to implement the Critical Online Resource Evaluation (CORE) intervention, developed by researchers at Concordia University. This intervention’s purpose was to teach students metacognitive and critical thinking practices when researching online sources by looking at source, context and content to determine a source’s reliability and credibility.
This mixed methods action research study with grade 9 students had two main purposes: to investigate the impact of a CORE intervention on helping students identify credibility and reliability; and, to compare the pedagogical approach of CORE to the Origin, Purpose, Content, Values, Limitations (OPCVL) method used to analyze sources through the international baccalaureate
program.
First, a pre-test and post-test design with a paired samples t-test was used to compare the results before and after the intervention and a significant improvement was noted for tasks involving evaluation directly. However, results from an information synthesis task were insignificant. Students written responses were also analyzed qualitatively for presence of evaluation justifications, which showed a 135% increase.
Second, the analysis of the pedagogical techniques was done by comparing the responses of a source analysis for a larger assignment using two OPCVL and two CORE methods. It was found that there was very little difference in the strength of these techniques, but more so that these methods varied in how they can be used in a disciplinary manner.